Patterns In Repeat by Laura Marling review: 'a tender pacifier of an album'

Laura Marling | Contributed

Laura Marling: Patterns In Repeat (Chrysalis/Partisan Records) ★★★★

Pixies: The Night The Zombies Came (BMG) ★★★

Lone Justice: Viva Lone Justice (AFAR) ★★★

In 2020, Laura Marling released an album called Song For Our Daughter which was so convincing in its songwriting integrity that many assumed it was inspired by new motherhood. As is her way, however, Marling was inhabiting a character and motherhood was far from her thoughts. Almost five years later, Marling is so captivated by her actual daughter, born in 2023, that she was toying with early retirement to devote herself entirely to bringing up her baby.

Like her peer Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, motherhood so far has been a heady transcendental experience, one from which music flowed while her baby bounced at her side. The resulting Patterns in Repeat is a tender pacifier of an album, written and recorded from her London living room, even featuring a little gurn from baby on the rapturous, fluttering Lullaby.

Child of Mine celebrates that mystical mother-child bond, while the beguiling Patterns meditates on the desire to replicate the love and care shown by her own parents. The gorgeous, twinkling simplicity of No One’s Going To Love You Like I Can could be applied to any ardent relationship, while Marling adds unearthly siren backing vocals to the quiet assurance of Your Girl.

She mines her Leonard Cohen-loving serenading instincts on timeless acoustic torch song The Shadows, embellished with the caress of Spanish guitar, wilting strings and the gentlest humming chorus of backing vocals. Caroline, meanwhile, is yet another Caroline song gently satirising all the other Caroline songs (“it went la la la la la la something something Caroline….”) in its tale of an older man haunted by an erstwhile love.

On a similar theme, Looking Back was written by her father Charlie Marling as a young man imagining old age, and is now sung by his thirty-something daughter, while Patterns On Repeat feels even more timeless, but was actually written by her partner George Jephson who has swapped music for the art of charcuterie, making Patterns In Repeat a family album down to the bone.

Pixies | Contributed

Thanks to frontman Black Francis’s lyrical attraction to all things weird and wired, Pixies have always been groovy ghoulies, but their tenth album is explicitly named and timed for Hallowe’en. The Night The Zombies Came is the debut of new bassist Emma Richardson – fittingly headhunted from Band of Skulls – who also brings chiming vocals to the mix, interlocking with Francis on fragrant opener Primrose.

From here, the band career and slalom through styles from the gothic folk rock ballad Mercy Me (“country music filled the air”) to the freewheeling Motoroller, inspired by a trip around Berlin, and hell-for-leather drag race of Oyster Beds.

Guitarist Joey Santiago contributes his first lyric to Hypnotised, borrowing from medieval poetic verse forms, as one does, while Francis is on grisly form on Chicken (“I’m dealing with decapitation”), but strangely Jane (The Night The Zombies Came) sounds positively festive with its sensation of sleighbells, sonorous guitar strokes and sweet harmonising vocals.

Lone Justice | Dennis Keeley

Los Angeles roots rockers Lone Justice arrived to a blizzard of acclaim in the early Eighties. By 1986 they had split up and frontwoman Maria McKee went on to a chart-topping solo career.

Viva Lone Justice revisits and revives odds and sods from the time – live recordings, covers and favourites from their early sets, including a raucous lo-fi bluegrass take on gospel standard Wade in the Water, a Cajun punk rendition of the George Jones song Nothing Can Stop My Loving You, a string-soaked I Will Always Love You from the days before Whitney got her mitts on it and a tear through Teenage Kicks with some Poly Styrene-style shrieks from McKee.

CLASSICAL

Claire Booth & Ensemble 360: Pierrot Portraits (Onyx) ★★★★★

Throughout the ages, Commedia dell’arte’s Pierrot character has been a malleable concept, all things to all people. In this ingenious programme, devised by Claire Booth and Ensemble 360 around Schoenberg’s seminal Pierrot lunaire, the lively soprano focusses on musical responses that stretch from early 19th century Schumann to the one living composer on the record, Thea Musgrave. It’s a ready-made box of delights further coloured by its shifting ensemble requirements. Pianist Tim Horton opens with the jabbing persistence of Schumann’s miniature sketch from Carnaval. Extravagant songs by the lesser-known Joseph Marx and Poldowski (Régine Wieniawski) mark Booth’s warm entrance before the vividly characterised instrumental drama of Thea Musgrave’s 1985 Pierrot. Beyond further incidentals by Debussy, Amy Beach, Max Kowalski and Korngold lies the kaleidoscopic melodrama of Schoenberg’s Op.21. Booth is superbly expressive in this, infinite detailed nuances and sharpened wit parrying deliciously with Ensemble 360’s own virtuosic inventiveness. Ken Walton

FOLK

Simon Kempston: My Dreams Are Theirs (Self-Portrait Records) ★★★★

The tremulously regretful lyrics, sweetly flowing fingerstyle guitar, heart unabashedly on the sleeve… it can only be Simon Kempston, a Scottish songwriting troubadour whose high and lonesome vocals derive perhaps from the lonely furrow he ploughs as a touring musician, spending much time in Europe or Canada. He’s a one-man band here, employing slide guitar as well as conventional acoustic, piano and harmonica, as well as multi-tracked vocals. His distinctively soft, grainy tenor can flip into near-falsetto, his lyrics wryly questioning or reproachful. There’s a warmth, though, to the bossa-like amble of Where My Love Belongs, reflecting his bemusement at becoming a parent. The Normal Life is a lament for lost chances, the bluesy Who Would Dare? features chirpy harmonica, while the love song Francesca’s Lament sees him singing over rippling guitar with a gentle, multitracked vocal refrain: “Nothing more words can add.” Jim Gilchrist